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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how inclusion shapes displacement and protection governance at the intersection of climate and development. It analyzes how legal categorizations in refugee and migration regimes produce protection gaps for environmentally displaced populations under conditions of uncertainty.

Paper long abstract

Climate and development related displacement has become a pressing development challenge, yet existing protection frameworks continue to rely on narrow categorizations that shape who is in need of international protection and assistance. Drawing on critical development studies and critical legal studies, this paper examines inclusion as a governing practice through which displacement and protection are conceptualized and rendered legible within institutional regimes.

Focusing on displacement at the intersection of climate change and development, particularly in African contexts marked by climate vulnerability and development intervention, the paper explores how protection regimes remain organized around categorical distinctions such as refugee, internally displaced person, or development displaced population. These distinctions structure legal status, access to rights, and institutional responses, even when lived experiences of displacement are shaped by overlapping environmental, economic, and political processes. Under conditions of increasing climate uncertainty, such classificatory architectures raise questions about how mobility is governed when causes of displacement cannot be easily disentangled.

The paper further examines how inclusion is operationalized through legal and policy frameworks that prioritize administrative responses over durable protection. In this sense, inclusion functions less as an expansive rights based framework than as a technique that organizes mobility, limits obligations, and stabilizes development trajectories. This institutionalization of inclusion can extend recognition while constraining agency. By foregrounding inclusion as a modality of governance, the paper contributes to debates on how migration and protection policies shape power and mobility in uncertain futures, and under what conditions inclusion reconfigures protection or reproduces existing hierarchies within displacement governance.